After a few months in the works I’m happy to announce Custom Metaboxes and Fields for WordPress version 0.9 is out and ready for consumption.

This is probably one of the large updates we have put out as it contains a lot of fixes, tweaks, and even a few nice additions. Taken straight from the readme, here’s a list of what new with 0.9!

• Cleaned up scripts being queued
• Cleaned up and reorganized jQuery
• Use $pagenow instead of custom $current_page
• Fixed CSS, removed inline styles, now all in style.css
• Fixed multicheck issues (issue #48)
• Fixed jQuery UI datepicker CSS conflicting with WordPress UI elements
• Fixed zeros not saving in fields
• Fixed improper labels on radio and multicheck fields
• Fixed fields not rendering properly when in sidebar
• Fixed bug where datepicker triggers extra space after footer in Firefox
• Added jQuery UI datepicker packaged with 3.3 core
• Added date time combo picker
• Added color picker
• Added readme.md markdown file

Bill and Norcross have put in a lot of time for past releases, so in this release I tried to pick up the slack as I hadn’t been as active.

If you are using 0.8 you should be able to upgrade without any issues. However it’s worth noting this release is for WordPress 3.3+ – if you have not upgraded to 3.3 do not use 0.9.

What’s next

The next version is going to be a good one, so definitely keep an eye out. You can take a peak at the To-do in the readme to get an idea of what’s on our radar. Specifically here’s a few things that are a priority in 1.0:

• Code cleanup. Since CMB has a rather large user base now, I figure we owe it to them to tidy up the code. This is going to be the #1 goal (but not the only) for 1.0.
• Improve inline documentation. This goes hand-in-hand with the first point.
• Move the jQuery datepicker and timepicker code inline and make each instance configurable with options passed through the array. This will allow multiple timepickers with different ranges, etc.
• Add array option for placeholder value. Now that most modern browsers support this (html5) it should be a no-brainer.
• Add array option for required elements. Like the previous point, this should be easy thanks to HTML5.

Props!

Special thanks to Gary Jones for some great feedback as well as tweaks, Bill for squashing a few bugs, and everyone who has been reporting bugs on GitHub.

Well I am here to tell you there is a much easier way. It’s fairly unknown and sparsely documented. It’s the template_include filter.

The use cases for template_include are endless but I will give you a great example where I recently took advantage of it.

Let’s say you have a category structure like below:

• Audio
• News
• Local
• Health
• Technology
• Sports
• Politics
• Travel
• Videos

Looks straight forward, right? Using the normal WordPress template hierarchy you can easily target these categories. We all know category-news.php would be used when viewing the News category or category-health.php would take care of the Health category.

However, what if you want to create a unique template for all the News sub-categories? Here are the two options you will usually find.

1. Create a category.php file and use conditionals to target the individual sub categories. Lame!
2. Create a template file for each sub-category (category-local.php, category-health.php, etc). Even more lame!

I want to have one template file that will be used for all the News sub-categories, not conditionals or duplicate scattered everywhere. With single snippet (which would be in functions.php) using the template_include filter this can be done!

<?php
add_filter( 'template_include', 'ja_template_check' );
function ja_template_check() {
	global $template;

	if ( is_category() ){

		// Get category information
		$cat = get_query_var( 'cat' );
		$category_info = get_category( $cat );

		// News sub-categories, where 7 is the ID for News
		if ( $category_info->parent == 7 ){
			$template_file = get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/subcategory-news.php';
			return $template_file;
		}
	}
	return $template;

}

The code above first checks to see if you are looking at a category. If that is true it then checks to see if the parent category ID is 7. Finally, if this checks out it uses a template file I created,  subcategory-news.php.

Pretty easy, right?

Props to @wpmuguru for sending me in this direction.

This is my personal “starter” theme (base theme) I use when working with a project running the Genesis Framework. It is based on of the Sample child theme by StudioPress with some minor modifications. Feel free to use it as you see fit. Obviously, it requires the Genesis Framework. Suggestions and forks encouraged. The GitHub page contains a bit more information.

Download (GitHub)

Ticket #1622 was opened just 2 weeks ago by jjj and was based on the bbPress Genesis Extend plugin I had thrown together to fix a few issues with Genesis. After a week of tossing the patches back and forth with jjj, we ended up with solid fix and he committed it just in time for rc5.

If you want to see the guts of the patch look no further than bbp-includes/bbp-extend-genesis.php. Quick breakdown of the patch:

• Fixes issue with bbPress pages not loading due to customized Genesis archive settings
• Removes post info & meta from bbPress pages
• Removes Genesis breadcrumbs from bbPress pages
• Removes Genesis author boxes from bbPress pages
• Removes pagination from bbPress pages
• By default, uses a full width layout across all bbPress pages

The last fix is really nice as it allows you to make sure a set layout is used across all your bbPress pages. Before this fix it was quite the task to get a consistent layout. The best thing is, thanks to jjj, it is completely filterable. So while, by default, bbPress uses the full-width-layout it can be easily changed using the bbp_genesis_force_full_content_width filter.

If you are using bbPress with Genesis and run into any issues, be sure and let me know in the bbPress forums or in #bbpress!

From my experience, 90% of the integration went smoothly. There are a few things that may crop up and screw with your iteration depending on how you have your Genesis settings configured.

I have thrown together a quick (translation: rough) plugin that should keep these oddities for occurring.

Download plugin

UPDATE: JohnJamesJacoby has taken this and turned it into an elegant patch. Needs testing, but looks very promising.

As I mentioned, this plugin isn’t quite done, which is why I haven’t submitted it to the .org repo yet. However, I noticed in the bbPress forums others were having this same issue, so hopefully this can help fix the issues until a packed plugin is released.

The root of the problem boils down to Genesis archive pages. By default these archive pages use the_content – when this is the case usually things work fine. Problems start creeping up when users change the archive settings in Genesis. If you have your archives set to automatically display a post thumbnail or to crop the content output to XXX characters, things break.

bbPress does all its magic by filtering the_content to add in all of the forum goodness. When Genesis changes what is output (say by adding post images or limited the content length) things explode because that is not what bbPress is expecting. I have bought this up in Genesis Trac and it doesn’t appear a fix will be applied to core, which judging by the length of this plugin I don’t blame them, so a plugin will be needed to fix the issues.

Hope this helps. If you have any questions just leave a comment!

First, lately I’ve had to deal with an obscene number of plugins that are terrible. The concept behind them is great, but the execution (code) is bad enough to warrant sticking a rusty fork in my eye. I understand, writing a good plugin is no easy task. However, thanks to new information available (such as this book), there is really no excuse for a plugin to cut corners. Or have no corners at all. I want to raise awareness and promote writing plugins the right way.

Secondly, I just released my own plugin into the wild: bbPress New Topic Notifications.

Professional WordPress Plugin Development is the best (and only) book which walks you through writing a plugin properly. It covers all the APIs and best practices, so you can be sure and receive all the praises of writing an awesome plugin.

Entering to win is simple. Just leave a comment that describes a plugin you would like to see written. Example: I’d like to see a plugin that enables avatar uploads for bbPress 2.0.

Two winners will be selected and announced on Friday.

Update: Congrats to Nick P. and Mannie S. – they were the two randomly selected winners. Check your inbox for more details! I’m hoping to run another giveaway with more goodies next month!

Preview of the admin settings

Download plugin

Many people who run forums would like to know when a new topic (thread) has been posted but do not have the time to constantly check their forum for activity. This solves that!

bbPress New Topic Notifications will send an e-mail notification to specific addresses when a new topic has been posted. The users who receive notification along with a simple e-mail template is configured in the bbPress settings.

Please report any bugs you find in the comments or the plugin page on WordPress.org.

The next major item on the to-do list is to add the option for notifications when a reply is posted.

Unlike the other CRMs out there I decided to create a custom post type for my contacts instead of doing a bunch of magic to use posts. In a few places throughout the app I needed to pull the total number of contact entries in the database.

Turns out, it is very easy to do! Just a few lines of code, which you can see below. Make sure and change contact to the name of your post type.

function ja_total_post_count() {
	global $wpdb;
	$numposts = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_type = 'contact'");
	if (0 < $numposts) $numposts = number_format($numposts);
	return $numposts;
}
// To use...
echo 'Number of total contacts: ' . ja_total_post_count();